Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing

Here is a SIGGRAPH 2007 presentation by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir on a novel way of resizing images. Arbitrarily resize an image while keeping important parts whole. It’s quite impressive, until the baby is squished. Can also be used to eliminate people from your pictures, Stalin-style. Coming soon to your Photoshop.

The nice part is that it automatically resizes when you collapse the window, but the technique of removing gaps inbetween contours and blending edges has been a two step process in Corel for ages. For example this took me longer to upload and copy-n-paste the links than it did to do:

This smart image processing algorithms are really great. I’ve stepped upon a tool that takes advantage of this new technique at reshade.com.You can browse the online gallery to see some real professional work with great quality and accuracy. If this doesn’t convince you, you can check it out on the website at reshade.com